New Trends in Speech Based Interactive Systems will give an overview of the research and application of speech technologies in different areas. The basic technology development areas include: Automatic speech recognition technology, speech synthesis, spoken interaction, natural language understanding, speaker recognition, emotion in spoken dialogue systems, expressive speech synthesis, affective computing, multimodal communication, interaction technologies, and animated agents. The application areas include: in-vehicle information system and interaction, military application, other industrial applications such as for space, air traffic control, or complicated control room interaction, simulator control, etc., and application for special users and in entertainment systems. General design and usability evaluation methodologies from the user’s perspective will also be included in the book. The overview of each technology includes: 1. The history and the development of the technology. 2. What are the hot research topics/interests in the technology? 3. What kind of mistakes/assumption that people has tried, so to avoid repeating the mistakes. 4. What can be the special interests/problems in different application areas? 5. The trend of the technical development in the coming few years. The overview of each application area includes: 1. The history of the application studies. 2. What kind of speech technologies are interested in the application. 3. The analysis of the factors that affect the real-time application. 4. What can be the possible usability requirements and interaction design problems? 5. The trend of the research focus in the coming few years. One of the special characteristics of the book is that the authors will not just present their own research work, but take a broad view of the multiple research areas and take the multidisciplinary approach to the topics. One of the goals in this book is to emphasize the application. User experience, human factors and usability issues are the focus in this book.